1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method, system, and article of manufacture for recovering remnant encrypted data on a removable storage media.
2. Description of the Related Art
Data stored on removable tape cartridges may be logically erased, but the data on the tape may remain. A tape cartridge that is logically erased may be placed in a pool of cartridges available for reuse, to store new data. New data written to a tape, which includes remnant blocks of data that were previously logically erased, has an End of Data (EoD) marker following the last block which was newly written to the tape. New data written to the tape would begin to overwrite the logically erased, has an end of data (EOD) marker following the last block written to the tape. Data written to the tape would overwrite the logically erased data remaining on the tape.
A user may want to recover data on a tape that is logically erased, but remains on the tape following the newly written EOD marker. Utilities exist to scan past the EOD marker to start reading the old data that remains on the tape to allow automatic recovery of the logically erased data that remains on the tape past the EOD marker of the currently written active data.
There is a need in the art for improved techniques for reading remnant data on a tape cartridge or other removable storage media, especially for remnant encrypted data.